Tag: laundry

Wednesday June 10th, 2020

I put up a rather long entry last night for Sunday, along with a photo of “dirty laundry.” Actually, the photo showed clean laundry on the ground, lying around a rolling rack. It felt like a fitting metaphor. I had “aired” some of the concerns we’ve encountered while trying to pull the dojo community together. That’s an unconscious brain at work for you: making connections.

The photo was also interesting because the larger, rolling rack, full of clothes, neatly enclosed both a smaller rack and a little kumquat tree. The larger rack had fallen over both without damaging either. A white gi, IFK symbol visible, along with my ichi kyu belt, were right on top of that pile, unsoiled. So odd, how neatly the picture encapsulated a metaphor for me. Poetic, too, given its backstory: the wind knocked down the rack. Looking at it, my eyes go straight to the gi and the tree.

But I’m supposed to be logging my daily exercise in preparation for my test through this blog. I did exercises this morning and this evening. Today got up to 97 degrees, so my evening exercises were tough. We are not running the air, since we’re expecting the heat to pass in a day. I also ran for twenty minutes on the treadmill and, once again, called a close friend.

We discussed strategies for getting through a mound of reading for graduate school. She’s taking her second graduate course. The timeline is compressed, since it’s a summer course. She’s also taking the course on-line. I told her how I’d learned to skim and scan large amounts of text in a short period of time.

As a literature student in graduate school, I had the advantage of discussing strategy with both professors and Phd candidates in person. I could ask, how the heck do you get through such a huge volume of secondary sources, along with your primary ones? I’d faithfully read everything as an undergraduate. While doing graduate work, you see there’s often simply too much information out there. You learn to skim and scan, in order to figure out what you actually need to read in depth for your particular topic. Often, I explained to my friend, you just need to know how and where to find important information. So surveying the available literature is primarily about understanding what’s already out there, and how to find it when you need it. I had my mentors, older graduate students and professors, to thank for that strategy.

Sunday June 7th, 2020

Organizing people is difficult, exhausting work. Who knew? We had a major conflict last week. One committee met, ostensibly, to plan the Zoom teaching schedule for next month. Instead, they talked about curriculum, even though several people on the call were not black belts. At least two black belts on the call felt their rank was not being respected.

I got all of this second-hand from F, my daughter. The two, after that meeting, decided to quit or minimally participate less. It seems that everyone was not aware that others on the call were uncomfortable with the topic of discussion. It seems that no one, save the teens, really spoke up.

One person I spoke with, however, pointed out that this would not have happened at all if we did not have a leadership vacuum. Maybe that is a problem with karate, or even our society: we are too used to having a “strong leader,” usually an assertive man. We expect all the answers to come from that one man. We’re not able to imagine how an actual democratic system, one that gives voice to both the weak and the strong, might function. Maybe I’m an idealist, but it will not come into being if we cannot even imagine it. As for me, I’ve studied the value of democracy since I was a child. Most of us have. Why doesn’t that apply here?

That doesn’t mean we throw out rank. We are not practicing karate if we are not respecting rank. And of course the higher rank should decide what to teach, and how to teach. But if we have a lower-ranking child propose going to the beach to practice karate, or a lower-ranking adult point out some potential risk during a fire-break, why would we not listen?

It took some smoothing over and an actual curriculum meeting of the Yudansha to head off black belts defecting. Nevertheless, one instrumental person, still upset, may scale back her participation. I called her today; we had a long talk.

F was upset and pulled in Sensei. He spoke with several of us. Then he worried about over-stepping, or rather, recognized that we need to have the ability to solve these kinds of conflicts on our own. It is true: if he retires, he won’t be around to mitigate our every disagreement. We need to learn to do it.

I am worried about the fact that we keep losing people. I know it’s a process, and any time you are dealing with a large number of people, you will have politics. However, I also look at what others have done: recently, in defense of black lives, there has been sustained, organized protest in many large cities across this country. These are locally organized, grass-roots groups, people no different than us, putting on these peaceful protests. I look at our Temple’s Sisterhood, and even our little Temple. It isn’t large, but it is an organization that’s been around for over sixty years.

We can do this. Our dojo community is full of intelligent, capable, agreeable, well-meaning people. This includes the folks who did the offending last week, as well as those offended. In order for people to be comfortable proposing ideas, we have to figure out how to reject bad ideas with kindness as well as embrace good ideas. As an engineer and artist, I know this: you have to be able to come up with, and reject, a whole bunch of bad ideas before you land on a good one. If our members are afraid to propose bad ideas, then they’ll be afraid to propose ideas.We need to figure out how to make it safe for everyone to toss out ideas, bad and good. And people need to feel safe arguing with each other.

Today we did hold another organizing meeting and some of us talked about reaching out to past members. This upset others. I participated in those discussions, and found out later it was upsetting for some. One of the people who had been part of the committee meeting that went awry last begged off, so I’m also worried that person might stop attending out of fear.

And you know what else happened today? This!

But notice the crazy thing: the laundry rack fell over in such a way that it failed to bring down the smaller rack, and somehow nothing damaged the little kumquat tree. And yes, there’s a gi top and a brown belt, but somehow that garment fell on top of other clothing items. F helped me lift up the rack and shake the dirt out of the clothes. Everything was fine, though it was work to put it all right again.

It is Southern California, and the winds are strong this time of year.